The Last Days of Disco
by Doyle-sb4
Summary: New York, 1977. Spike's there to kill the Slayer. Angel's just trying to disappear. Spangel, R.


Title: The Last Days of Disco  
Author: Doyle  
Pairing: Spike/Angel  
Rating: R  
Spoilers: Orpheus, Fool for Love, Why We Fight  
Notes: S/A ficathon entry. For theantijoss, who wanted snarking and bloodplay. 

If it hadn't been for the scent, and the barely-perceptible sense that family was nearby, he might not have recognised him at all.

"Angelus," Spike said, sprawling over the plastic seat opposite without waiting to be invited. "Been looking for you. Dru said Daddy was somewhere in the city. Didn't expect to run into you so quick."

For a moment, Angel just stared blankly at him. There was the hair, gone white as his skin and smelling harshly of chemicals, and the thick black strokes around his eyes (were men wearing make-up in this decade? He hadn't noticed, but then he didn't know many people). There was the jewellery, the piercings in his ears and – when he flashed a cocky grin at having surprised his grandsire – the stud through his tongue.

But most startling was just that he was here. In America, in New York, in the goddamn coffee shop that Angel went to because hardly anyone ever bothered him there.

"What are you doing here?"

"Don't sound so pleased to see me, not here to play catch-up." One of the waitresses stopped at the table, stub of pencil poised over her pad, and Spike said, "What's the special, pet?"

She ducked her head, bangs obscuring her expression, and mumbled out the menu. She'd been working for Phil a month before Angel had gotten a good look at her face.

"Just coffee, then. Black, lots of sugar. Nice little piece," he said, when she'd gone to get his order. He grinned ferociously at her back. "Should watch herself. This city'll eat nice girls right up."

"Stay away from her," Angel said. "In fact – just stay away. Far away. See in the Eighties in Moscow."

"Don't get your polyester tracksuit in a twist, mate." He flicked a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket. "Here to see a man about a vampire slayer. Got a light?"

Angel dug out his lighter, tossed it across the table.

Spike caught it one-handed. "Nice," he said, flashing it beneath the lights. He lit two cigarettes, hand cupped around his mouth, and passed one to Angel, slipping the silver lighter out of sight. Angel didn't protest. He'd had it since before the war, but it was more than worth giving up in order to get Spike out of his life as quickly and painlessly as possible.

With Spike, of course, painless usually wasn't an option, but he had to try.

"You're still chasing slayers," he said. "That's… unusually focussed, for you."

If Spike felt insulted, he didn't show it. "Oh, this'un's a spitfire. Proper warrior of the light side of the force."

The what? Angel shook his head as the waitress came back with Spike's order. She filled Angel's cup, too, smiling shyly at him. He tried to smile back. Her nametag said 'Carla'. She'd served him coffee every other day for almost three months and he hadn't noticed that before.

She left again, and he hunched over his coffee, hands curled around the cup so tight it burned his palms. "Where's Drusilla?"

"Around. Amusing herself with some kids down in the Bronx."

He didn't watch much TV, or pay attention to the news, but he knew about the rash of murders in the city. People were calling them zodiac killings – too organized for Spike, who got bored within minutes of trying to implement a plan, but Drusilla? Maybe.

Or more likely it was nothing to do with them at all. Humans screwing each other over, like at that hotel in LA, all of them with no idea of the real monsters lurking in the darkness.

"So where's Darla, anyway?" Spike asked. "Haven't see her since Chicago."

He didn't care about Darla. He hadn't seen her in close to eighty years. Never gave her a thought, these days. He didn't want Spike to tell him what she'd been doing or where she might be now. He just wanted to finish his coffee and go home and never see Spike or Dru or any of the rest of them again.

He looked down at the vinyl tabletop and sighed. "Chicago?"

"Must've been, what, sixty years ago? Her and Luke were trying to round up the whole clan. Some family shindig out in California."

"Luke?" Angel forced out, outrage temporarily overtaking ennui. "She's back with Luke?"

"Big guy, ugly, protruding forehead?" Spike shifted so his legs were stretched across the seats. His boots matched the rest of the outfit's fetish for black leather and silver. "Yeah, can't imagine what she'd see in him." He exhaled a thin stream of smoke. "Me an' Dru weren't about to traipse across country to kowtow to great-great-grandfather dearest. Told Darla to sod off, go looking for Penn or the rest. How come you didn't go? Thought you were one of the Master's golden boys."

"Maybe my invite got lost in the mail," he muttered. His cigarette was one long column of ash. He stubbed it out on the metal tray beside the window.

So they were all in America, or they had been at one time; Darla, Dru, Spike, Penn, Luke. Maybe Elizabeth and James, too. It was easier to think of them purely as parts of his past, just more guilty proof of the regrettable things he was done with.

That always worked fine right up until the point where one of them turned up on a submarine, or walked into his coffee shop.

The one great advantage of not being stuck beneath the ocean this time was that he could get up and walk away. "I'm leaving," he said, getting to his feet and dropping a ten dollar bill onto the table.

"Yeah," Spike called after him. "Aren't you always?"

---

He didn't go back for a week. Spent those seven days holed up in his apartment, only taking the subway across the city to get blood from his supplier. On the third day, bored, he bought a cheap book of paper and set of pencils from the store on his route home. He hadn't drawn in years, expected pictures of Darla to flow out, or graphic nightmares of the people he'd brutalized.

First sketch: William, the night Drusilla brought him home. All awkward limbs and shy, eager eyes.

The second one: Spike, the first time he'd ever claimed that name. Feral, manic from the kill, and the paper tore from him scoring too hard when he tried to shade in the blood.

By Friday he could only get to the tiny kitchen by walking across a carpet of drawings, and he decided he had to get a change of scenery.

---

Phil, the coffee shop's manager, looked haunted. Angel had to repeat his order twice, and when it hadn't been forthcoming twenty minutes later he went back to the counter.

"You okay?" he asked reluctantly, not wanting to hear about the guy's insignificant little human problems, whatever they were.

The man shook himself. "Yeah, sure, I'm fine. It's just, ah, Carla, girl who worked here – brown hair, pretty? She hasn't been to work in a couple days, and she's not answering her phone."

Angel felt his whole body tense.

"Maybe she just got a better job," Phil said. He'd been wiping the same spot on the counter for five minutes. Angel watched the cloth's slow circles, wondering how long it would take before the surface wasworn away.

"Maybe," he echoed.

---

The lock on his apartment door was splintered. Kicked in. Could have been demons, other vampires, even humans – though he trusted that the contents of his refrigerator would scare most off – but he had smelled him from outside the building, and he slammed the door open so hard he heard the hinges give. "Get the hell out, Spike."

Spike, sitting on the threadbare couch and leafing through a stack of papers, looked no more inclined to obey than he had ninety years ago. "Y'know, I think like this one best," he said, turning it around and holding it up. William, head thrown back and mouth open, hands crossed and bound above his head at an angle that had to be excruciating. Thin, sharp lines across his torso, and Angel could remember their placement to the quarter-inch but not whether he'd made them with a whip or a knife. His memory was photographic, it seemed, only when it came to the aftermath, the pretty new boy begging him to stop, begging him harder to keep going.

The memory pulsed through him like a physical beat, and he suddenly didn't want to be anywhere near Spike. "Get out of my city."

"Don't see your name on it," he said, dropping the picture to the floor. He laced his fingers together and lazily stretched his arms above his head, the movement making his joints crack. "Los Angeles you might have a case for."

Angel crossed the room in three steps, unmindful of the papers crumpling underfoot. "Did you kill her?"

"Not yet, but I'm wearing her down. Hell of a fight tonight."

"Not the slayer," he snapped, "the girl at the diner. Carla. Did you kill her?"

He shrugged. "Don't rightly remember. Ate somebody outside there the other night. Got bored waiting for you to show up."

Angel had him by the throat in a second, bearing him roughly back against the couch, and he was furious and he only meant to threaten him, but his body just saw him treating William as he always had, back then, and reacted as normal. Spike thrust eagerly against him, eyes flashing gold.

For a moment, before Angel came to himself and wrenched away, they could have been back in that mineshaft a hundred years ago, nothing changed at all. Same people, same patterns, wasn't he supposed to be different now? Wasn't that the whole fucking point, and wasn't his past ever going to just let him be?

Spike looked confused, his eyes fading back to blue. "What's wrong?"

He let himself sink onto the couch, too tired to do anything else. "Get out," he said again.

But Spike sat down beside him, because he could never let anything go, not even after a century. "Angelus, what the hell happened to you?"

He closed his eyes. "Don't call me that."

He heard him take in breath – irritated, or just at a loss as to what was going on – and then Spike said: "Liam?"

He must have heard it from Darla. Angel knew he had never told him, and Drusilla had never known his real name, unless Miss Edith told her.

"Looked around your place a bit," Spike went on, voice unusually subdued.

"Figured you just got sidetracked by the pictures of yourself."

"Well, for starters, my hair does not look like that, I'm drastically out of proportion, and you have the worst record collection in the known history of the world."

The non sequitur took him off track for a few seconds, long enough for Spike to add, "And you've got blood in the fridge. Bagged up. You're not hunting. What'd they do to you?"

Angel brought his head up. "They?"

"The army," Spike prompted him. "Bastards did something to your head, made you their little soldier-bitch, didn't they? Stopped you from feeding so you had to do what they told you. Like get their brave Yankee heroes off the seabed."

"The Nazis took me prisoner, just like you."

"Bollocks," he said. "Lawson said you were full-on for truth, justice and the American bloody way."

Lawson. He hadn't thought about him in more than thirty years, and the memory sent him into a fresh attack of guilt. The soul apparently didn't care that he might have died by now even if they'd never met, that he definitely would have died on that sub if Angel hadn't turned him.

"When did Lawson tell you that?" He hadn't thought they'd exchanged four words.

"Bloke got dumped by his sire," Spike said. "Swam twenty miles, dragged himself onto the beach, didn't even know that the sun'd burn him. Somebody had to teach him."

"He hated you."

"I hated you. Doesn't come into it."

Angel actually smiled slightly at this revisionist version of history, a bleak, cold sort of smile. "You never hated me."

Spike sat back, folding his arms across his chest. Angel noted the ragged remnants of his t-shirt sleeves, wondered if he'd done it himself or if his wardrobe had been a casualty of the fight with the slayer. The muscles in his upper arms twitched beneath the skin. "Oh, forgot you're a mind reader. Must be where Dru gets it from."

"You admired me," he said. "I think you liked me, times when we got on okay. You envied me. You hated the fact that Drusilla wanted me and not you, that she was mine first and that meant she was never really yours. You wanted me, even when I hurt you – especially when I hurt you – and that made you hate yourself." You loved me, he would have said, except Spike didn't have a soul and that couldn't have been true, no matter how much it would have needled him.

Spike was on his feet, scowling down at him. "Piss off."

"I was just about to suggest the same to you."

He did get out, then, kicking up pictures of himself like a child making a path through fallen leaves, and he got right to the door before he whirled around for his parting shot. "I wanted you? Funny how I'm not the one doodling hundreds of besotted little pictures. Night, Angelus."

---

He stayed away for nearly twenty hours. Angel hadn't even wasted the time and energy fixing the door.

"You know why you piss me off?" Spike said, as if the argument had never stopped. "You just presume that you know me. You nance out of my life for seventy years and you think I haven't changed."

He'd been heating some blood on the stove when Spike had interrupted. Doing this in front of anybody – let alone another vampire, let alone Spike - made for a horrible amount of embarrassment and shame, but to stop would be to let Spike see that, so he continued as if this was something all vampires did, retrieving the mug from the side and carefully filling it from the pan.

His last blood straight from the source had been Lawson. There were places, he knew, where human idiots who had a thing for blood and danger were willing donors, but he'd never gone looking for one. He wasn't that pathetic, he told himself, meaning that he didn't think he deserved even that small amount.

The blood that he raised to his mouth was human, but it didn't taste right. Maybe the hospital did something to it, meant to discourage vampires looking for a quick, easy meal.

"Smells rank," Spike said.

"Who offered you any?"

"Already ate, but cheers for asking. Dru and me shared an Italian." He grinned, kicking his heels against the cabinet doors. Angel wanted to tell him to get off his kitchen counter, get out of his apartment and never come back, but somehow he found himself just drinking his dinner and watching him.

Spike said he'd changed, or at least resented the implication that he couldn't. Angel looked for it, tuning out most of what he was saying, some excited description of fighting the slayer in Central Park. On the outside he looked totally different, all bleach and kohl and ripped clothes, but that was superficial; he could have that and still be the boy who'd tailed longingly after him, simultaneously aching for daddy's approval and doing his damnedest to piss him off.

But he hadn't lived for more than a hundred years, back then, or had Drusilla to himself. He hadn't had that livid scar above his eye that he'd bragged was a trophy from the slayer in China.

"Hey. You even listening?"

"I think you're right," Angel said, wondering if those were words he'd said to Spike before, ever. "You have changed."

Spike's eyes narrowed. He hadn't changed so much, then, that he could deal with being told he was right when what he wanted was to argue about it. Dropping to his feet, he slapped the mug out of Angel's hand. The blood splattered on the floor in a long, crimson streak. Before Angel could stand, or do anything more violent than growl and glare at him, Spike was straddling him on the chair.

"Bloody right I have," he hissed at his ear, voice all intimacy and poison. "Not a little boy for you to push around any more." Angel felt the barest grazing of teeth along his neck. "I want something," Spike said, "I take it."

Angel didn't make a single move.

Spike shoved off him, slamming his fist down onto the table. "What the fuck happened to you?" he raged. "How can you just sit there like none of it meant anything?"

"It didn't," he said simply, and the blankness of that stopped Spike in his tracks long enough for Angel to just leave the room.

The light in his bedroom had blown a couple of weeks ago. He couldn't see a point to replacing it; he could see just as well in the dark.

He stared at the ceiling, listening to late-night New York outside the window, and listened to the crashes in the other room as Spike systematically demolished the apartment. That splintering smash would have been the chair, probably thrown against the door. Ten, he thought. Nine. Eight.

He was on two when the bedroom door slammed back. Spike was outlined in the doorway, hand gripped around a makeshift stake that he guessed had until recently been a chair leg.

"Get up."

There was a crack all the way along his ceiling. He traced it with his eyes, following the way it meandered like a river, until his view was blocked by a furious-looking Spike.

"I said get up."

Angel wondered when he'd learned to talk through his fangs without lisping. The point of the stake dug sharply into his bare chest. "If you're gonna kill me, just do it," he said, knowing it was the opposite of what he'd always taught the boy. He'd preached artistry and William had wanted destruction; now they were reversed, and he didn't think Spike had even noticed. "You know, you could have killed two slayers by now. Twenty of them."

He brought his knee up between Spike's legs – not hard enough to hurt, much, but with enough force to knock him off balance, and that let him pull the vampire across him and onto the bed. At the end of the move Spike was flat on his back, Angel was sitting across him, pinning his arms to his sides, and the stake was somewhere on the floor.

"They're humans," Angel went on, ignoring Spike's struggles to get up. "They may be strong, fast, but they're little human girls. They have to go for their weapon. You've got yours. Use it. Don't piss around with epic fights to the death, just get it done."

"They want it," Spike ground out, too pinned down to do anything but arch his hips off the bed, grinding against Angel, who clamped his jaw against the moan that tried to break free. "You should see her, Angelus. She's glorious. The way she moves, the way she fights – older than most of 'em are, got some years behind her. Wants me as much as I want her." Angel felt him harden through his jeans. His own arousal, not covered by anything, was far more obvious.

Before he could list the many, many reasons why this was a bad idea, he let his face shift. With his demon to the fore, rational thought was always lost to the murky desires of his id, and right now it wanted to mark Spike, hurt him. He sank his fangs into the solid, pale shoulder beneath him, deep enough to touch bone. Spike howled and bucked, but there was a difference in how he moved, now; it had been so fucking long since Angel had done this but he could still tell when someone was trying to get away.

He released his grip on one wrist, then the other. "Don't move them." The blood that he licked off his lips and teeth was still a little warm. Rich and human, no chemical aftertaste. Even filtered through another vampire, it was intoxicating.

There was no hope, now, of stopping this before it got any further. Angel marked him in slow, shallow trails, alternating them with the deeper bites that ripped screams from Spike. He lapped roughly along the lines of blood, sucking hard against the skin to get every drop. It brought dark red bruises in circles across his chest. He hadn't yet touched him below the waist but he kept his hand clamped low and tight around his cock, a reminder not to come too soon, or move his hands.

"Knew you hadn't changed, not really," Spike was mumbling, possibly to himself. His eyes were glazed over. "Just had to bring it out of you."

Angel caught him across the mouth with the back of his closed fist. "I say you could talk?" Blood welled up from the split lip and he bent to catch it. Spike's tongue slid into his mouth and a hundred years ago he would have beaten him for that, for turning it into a kiss when he hadn't been told he could. Here and now, in 1977, in a tenement room in New York, he let it go.

He wished he could let all of it go.

---

"Be daylight soon."

"Hm."

"I need to get back. See Dru's all right." Startled hiss of pain: "Ow! Fucking… yeah, do that. Right there."

Before dawn, though, he did leave.

---

He saw him once more. Outside the apartment building, lounging in the shadows against the wall, his features flaring into brightness and then disappearing again as he flicked the lighter on and off.

He was happy, Angel thought as he approached him, more than the simple satiated happiness of the newly-fed and newly-fucked – he was shifting in place, eyes bright and excited. And he was radiating genuine confidence rather than the practiced bravado that usually passed for it.

He'd only seen him like this once before.

"You killed the slayer."

"I did." He held out his arms and for a bizarre, off-kilter moment Angel thought he wanted a hug, before he realized he was showing off his coat. It was black leather, worn, reaching to his ankles. "Got me a memento, too."

Two of them. He'd never heard of a vampire doing that before.

"Nothing to do with your little pep talk," Spike added. "Would've killed her tonight regardless. Just coincidence is all."

He'd waited outside instead of coming up. "You're leaving."

He scuffed his boots in the dirt. In the alley behind him, a rat chittered and disappeared underneath a pile of garbage. "Moving on. Dru doesn't much care for the Big Apple. Says the skyline looks all wrong or something. You know how she gets."

Angel didn't think too much on the girl Spike had killed. He had no face, not even a name, and she was consigned to the same mountain of guilt as all the other kills by those he'd sired. "Dru must be proud of you."

"Dunno," he said, "haven't told her yet." Angel imagined that the look Spike gave him was hopeful, nearly shy, afterecho of the times when they hadn't been trying to kill each other, when William had followed him with awe and barely hidden adoration. Maybe that was all in his mind and it was just Spike waiting to be congratulated or knocked on his ass or fucked through the wall.

In the end, he pulled him up to his rooms and tried a little of all three.

---

Spike was gone. Battered and bleeding, he'd pulled his clothes back on and went to find Drusilla. "See you in forty years, then," had been his version of goodbye. "Seems to be our pattern."

"Forty years," Angel had said, and then he was gone.

He tried to draw, retreating back into an old way of alleviating his obsessions, but nothing came out. He tried to clean up the apartment but found he didn't care if everything was broken. He tried to eat something and the blood was bland and unpalatable, like a human version of what blood should taste like. At two in the morning he made his way to the basement and the building's communal showers and stood under the freezing stream, hands flat to either side of a jagged crack in the tiled wall.

It didn't help.

Phil's place was open all night. On a whim, Angel went for the jukebox across from the counter, fumbled through his pockets for a coin. He picked Mandy, because it was pretty and because during his little tantrum Spike had smashed his records.

A couple came out of the door behind him that led to the two bathrooms. The woman was menstruating; he could smell the blood between her legs and he'd been like this after Lawson, too, flying apart beneath his skin and awareness of everything turned up too high.

He turned away, pretending to look at the track listing inside the machine, and they passed by.

He'd done this before. Just had to calm down, ignore the heartbeats and the blood-tang right under the surface, and it'd go away, fade back to dull, bearable misery.

He sat on one of the stools at the counter. Phil poured him coffee, added a doughnut he hadn't asked for. Neither of them tasted of anything.

Calm. Centred. Think about something as mundane as the coffee in front of him, don't look up, don't look at Phil or at the other guy, the only other customer. He drew in on himself, trying not to hear their heartbeats.

He was almost there when the first shot rang out.

END


End file.
